1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data caches, and in particular to methods and mechanisms for utilizing a memory cache located in a memory controller for browsing applications in mobile electronic devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern day mobile electronic devices often include multiple components or agents sharing access to one or more memory devices. These multiple agents may make large numbers of requests to memory, and as the number of these requests increases, the power consumption of the device increases, which limits the battery life of the device. One approach for reducing power consumption is to try to reduce the number of times that off-chip memory is accessed by caching data in or near the processor.
For commonly recurring tasks, the display of a mobile electronic device may be static for a considerable length of time. For example, the device may be used in an internet browsing application with the user looking at various web pages. After a given web page has been downloaded and displayed on the screen, the user may stay at this given web page, with the device screen not changing, for a considerable length of time. This type of browsing activity can be quite prevalent for many users of mobile electronic devices.
For a typical mobile electronic device, the display may be driven from a frame buffer stored in memory. The frame buffer may include pixels with a one-to-one mapping to the dimensions of the display, and the frame buffer may be written to the display a fixed number of times per second. For example, in one embodiment, the frame buffer may be written to the display 60 times per second. Various graphics processors and/or logic may be used to generate the individual frames which are stored in the frame buffer. However, when the display content is not changing, retrieving the frame buffer from memory 60 times per second to drive the display is a power intensive activity.